Feature request for Cron-Task (adhoc, availability-restriction)

[peta3000]

On Moodle instances, where the reengagement activity is heavily used (e.g. 10+ times per course) for granular participant notification, the number of activity-instances rises quickly with rising number of such courses.
I saw instances having >4000 existing instances of the activity in courses of their Moodle instance.
The cron task on such a Moodle site takes around 4 minutes to run and finish.
During this time, cron is blocked and other cron-tasks have to wait.

It would be great to have a solution for such heavy-use scenarios.

I was thinking of different ways to resolve this problem:

1. having the task running in the background, as an adhoc task
2. after course end-date the existing instances of the reengagement activity in this course are excluded from being checked by task
3. maybe there is a more elegant solution the plugin developers might think of having deeper knowledge of the plugin

Many thanks and best regards

[danmarsden]

Thanks @peta3000 yes that's a known issue with this plugin that would be nice to fix one day - it's not something we are actitvely working on right now, but feel free to reach out privately if you would like to fund improvements to the plugin - alternatively if you have internal development capabilities, pull requests are always welcome.

[peta3000]

Dear @danmarsden
Many thanks for your quick reaction and reply!
I'll have an open ear/eye regarding possible funding/development of this feature.

Cheers

p

[danmarsden]

thansk @peta3000 - quite a bit PR there so it might sit for a while until we get a chance to review it properly - I also note that your commit reverts d358026 so you'll need to fix that.

I note you say that it includes multiple fixes but I couldn't see if that was just because you fixed one thing - it also resolved another related issue but if you have distinct changes it would be faster for us to review if you split those changes into separate commits.

[peta3000]

Hii @danmarsden
Thanks for your comment, but actually I haven't committed a PR lately.
Can it be that you were intending to address @weilai-irl and his recent PR #155 ?

Never mind and best regards

[danmarsden]

whoops - yeah that's the one - thanks!

[scoriess]

Hi @danmarsden, I'm working as liaison for a client who is interested in a quote for the fix of this known issue. Should I reach out through this channel of communication?

King Regards

[danmarsden]

yes - that's a good place to start :-)